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The Enemies of Rome

From Hannibal to Attila the Hun

Publisher: Thames & Hudson (November, 2004)

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This engrossing and original book looks at the growth and eventual demise of Rome from the viewpoint of the peoples who fought against it.

Here is the reality behind legends such as Spartacus the gladiator, and the stories of Shapur the conqueror, Viriathus the guerrilla leader and Mithridates the connoisseur of poisons.

Some enemies of Rome were noble heroes, others were murdering villains, but each has a unique and fascinating story.

Defying the might of Rome was a dangerous business, and few of the men and women described in these pages died in their beds. Some, like Vercingetorix and Jugurtha, were captured, exhibited in triumph and then, while their conquerors sat down to a festive dinner, killed in the dungeons below. Rather than face such an end, some of Rome's greatest adversaries, including Hannibal, Boudicca and Cleopatra, killed themselves.

'A highly readable gallop through a number of major military crises in Roman history ... good, clear, old-fashioned narrative style'

The Sunday Telegraph

A splendid collection of heroes, desperadoes and villains.

This book was born from a discussion in one of the pubs around St John's college in Oxford. (Either the Lamb and Flag, or the Eagle and Child - known locally as the 'Bird and Baby'. My uncertainty is partly due to the number of such evenings and the amount of beer involved.) In any case, I took the position that Rome was at best a mitigated benefit to most cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and at worst an unmitigated disaster.

Time and research have softened that stance somewhat, but the suspicion also became a certainty that without Rome there would still have been a Mediterranean civilization, but it would have been a more diverse and multi-cultural affair.

Consequently, when T&H kindly invited me to consider writing a second book for them, I put forward the idea that I should introduce the different peoples of the Mediterranean region and describe their culture and military systems. The period chosen was the point these people met Rome, for the very good reason that there was not much left to describe by the time Rome had finished.

Since I have always felt biography is an under-rated form of historiography, I decided that each of these different enemies of Rome should be personified by a particular individual. At one time the chapter titles were arranged according to name and people, so we had (for example) 'Zenobia and the Palmyrans' and 'Alaric and the Goths'. This was changed when an editor noted that the chapter list looked like the line-up of bands at a backwoods pop festival.

Having arrived at the format through trial and error, the actual book almost wrote itself. The lives of the protagonists were so interesting and full of action that I felt no compulsion to spice up the action with literary tricks, but simply let the narrative flow. The book has sold very well, and may see a further incarnation in due course.

It is my ambition to return to each of these individuals and give each the benefit of a full book. The first of these to make it as a title in his own right has been that old reprobate Mithridates of Pontus, published in 2008. Give him a big hand, folks!

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